The State of the World

A special, in-depth examination of a post-Bush world, covering the good, the bad, and the unknown.

Now that the Bush presidency is over, it's time those of us left behind assess the damage and seize the opportunities. There's plenty of both. But there's no time to waste, so let's get started: the good news, the bad news, and the news that could change everything.

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Illustration by Joe McKendry

Iran: The Coming Distraction

Good News: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered a worse midterm election than George Bush, with his political allies losing metro elections all over the country and his mullah mentors failing to grab seats in the crucial Assembly of Experts, a college-of-cardinals body that'll pick Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's successor. With the supreme leader on a Francisco Franco-like deathwatch, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani's stunning resurrection (crushed by Ahmadinejad in the '05 presidential election, now he's the Assembly's deputy mullah) suggests our latest Muslim "Hitler" is nothing more than a Persian Newt Gingrich. And over the next two years, we're looking at a potential wholesale swap-out of the senior leadership, and if the result isn't more pragmatism, expect supremely pissed-off college students to do more than just chant "Death to the dictator," like they did recently during an Ahmadinejad speech. Iran is crumbling from within, economically and socially, much like the late-Brezhnevian Soviet Union. In any post-Khamenei scenario, Rafsanjani could easily play Andropov (patron) to the rise of some would-be reformer (like the currently ascending mayor of Tehran) who'd likely try to restructure (perestroika, anyone?) the failed revolutionary system as a going concern in the global economy. Bush's recent full-court press -- UN sanctions, moving a carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf, arresting Iranian operatives in Iraq -- has put the mullahs on the defensive and might end up being very clever. But the president's got to be careful. The minute he gets violent, Beijing and Moscow are outta here, not to mention the American public.

Bad News: Iran is successfully spreading its influence throughout the region, with significant regime-bonding investment strategies unfolding in southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But since that's intimately tied to the price of oil, Iran's strategy is subject to Saudi containment. Tehran's mullahs may put a muzzle on Ahmadinejad now and dump him in two years, but they still want the bomb (and no, that's not an irrational desire after we toppled regimes to their east and west). As far as they're concerned, America's wars to date have left Iran the regional kingpin, and they're right. So Tehran might as well start acting like it while taking the necessary precautions against an inevitable downstream military confrontation with Washington. (Did I mention that the Persians gave us chess?) Iran's shown itself to be a crafty asymmetrical warrior, using proxies Hamas and Hezbollah to demonstrate that it can conflate the region's conflicts at will, so it is not to be underestimated. The mullahs get deterrence all right, as well as preemptive war. If you're unconvinced, talk to Israel as it continues to lick its wounds from last summer.

Wild Card: As Tehran nears the bomb, Israel may well strike first, convinced the second Holocaust is imminent due to Ahmadinejad's skill at turning phrases. A signal of the end times to many believers, it may well be Dick Cheney's plan all along. The problem is, Israel's not up for much more than a token strike (unless it goes preemptively nuclear, at which point all bets are off), so having Israel try and fail conventionally may be a necessary precursor for Bush's -- and the Saudis' -- final solution. But don't expect Iran's pragmatic mullahs to sit on their hands in the meantime. They recognize a losing hand when they see one and may well trade off on Lebanon and Shiite Iraq if Israel's push comes to Bush's shove. At that point, everyone will recognize that Riyadh -- and not Tehran -- really won the Iraq war.

Good News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Cynically expressed, the Big Bang strategy was always about speeding the killing necessary to trigger systemic change, so the worse Iraq becomes, the more the process picks up speed. I mean, you can't get to the punch line any faster than by forcing the House of Saud to deal directly with an Al Qaeda hornet's nest right next door in the Sunni Triangle (the Saudis' first choice was a security fence on the border -- go figure!) while simultaneously triggering Riyadh's proxy war with Tehran in Baghdad. Toss in some Israeli nukes and finally the neocons have really got this party started, because those are the three knockdown fights they believe need to unfold before any serious restructuring of the region's power relationships can occur. A lesser variant has Washington prying Damascus away from Tehran, holding down the fort in Baghdad, and getting Riyadh's tacit approval for Israel's preemptive war on Iran in exchange for a supported solution on Palestine, but that almost seems boring in comparison.

Bad News: It's not as dead as you may think -- or pray. Bush and the neocons never had a clue about what was naturally coming on the heels of Saddam's fall (i.e., the Shiite revival) any more than they had a plan about Iraq's postwar occupation. Their in-progress Iranification of the Long War against the global jihadist movement makes even less sense than Bush's poorly planned decision to invade Saddam's secularized Iraq. The Salafist jihad spearheaded by Al Qaeda is exclusively Sunni derived, so why add into the mix their hated enemies, the Shiites? Bush is like the barroom brawler who enters the joint and declares, "I'm taking all of you bastards on" -- read: axis of evil -- "right here and now!" His administration has committed the fatal mistake that Clinton deftly avoided in the Balkans: They've let the conflicts accumulate instead of tackling them sequentially. The White House's unfolding Iran strategy is nothing more than an ass-covering exercise on Iraq and Afghanistan -- a third splendid little war to divert attention from the two previous failures.

Wild Card: If there was ever a time for Al Qaeda to cripple Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, now is it. Delivered with the right fingerprints, Al Qaeda might be able to get just enough unity among the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for a full-blown war with Iran. Nothing would set China on a more aggressive course regarding its long-term access to energy in the region, and therein lies Osama bin Laden's best hope for setting "rising Asia" against an aging West in the Persian Gulf.

Good News: The world has never enjoyed a bigger and more dynamic global economy than the one we're riding high on right now, with unprecedented amounts of poverty reduction concentrated in China and India alone. Advanced economies are expanding steadily in the 2 to 3 percent range, while emerging markets dash along in the 7 to 8 percent range, giving us a stunning -- and steady -- global growth rate of roughly 5 percent. Rising Asia will add upwards of a billion new consumers (i.e., people with disposable income) in the coming years, providing the biggest single impulse the global economy has ever experienced. Financial flows in 2005 hit $6 trillion, more than double the total in 2002. If terrorists are running the world, nobody has told the global financial markets.

Bad News: There's plenty to be nervous about, especially if you're a white-collar worker who's always assumed your job can't be outsourced. (Hint: If your graduate degree involved tons of memorizing facts, you're in the crosshairs.) But with financial panics becoming far less frequent and damaging (e.g., a recent scare in Thailand passed without turning contagious), the biggest dangers now are political. Trade protectionism is on the rise (keep an eye on our Democratic Congress), and the World Trade Organization's Doha Development Round is going nowhere because the West refuses to reduce agricultural subsidies. But neither trend surprises, as a rising tide lifts everybody's demands when it comes to trade deals.

Wild Card: A supply shock in the maxed-out oil industry, which faces a persistently rising long-term global demand due overwhelmingly to skyrocketing requirements in emerging markets led by China and India. "Peak oil" predictions are overblown, focusing exclusively on easily extracted, known conventional reserves. If prices remain high, then the shift to exploiting unconventional reserves and alternative energy sources will grow exponentially. But timing is everything, so a shock to the system could have the lasting effect of moving us down the hydrocarbon chain faster toward hydrogen, nuclear, and renewables. When that happens, it won't be just Al Gore sticking out his chest in pride -- we'll all be able to breathe more easily.

Good News: We have killed or captured a good portion of Al Qaeda's senior brain trust, meaning the generational cohort of leaders who built up the transnational network to the operational peak represented by the 9/11 strikes. As a result, Al Qaeda's network is a lot more diffuse and dispersed, with the surviving leadership's role trimmed back largely to inspirational guidance from above on strategy and tactics. Yes, Al Qaeda now takes credit for virtually every terrorist act across the globe, but the truth is that its operational center of gravity remains southwest Asia -- specifically Iraq's Sunni Triangle and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. As worldwide revolutionary movements go, this one is relatively contained and successful only in terms of generating local stalemates against intervening external powers, meaning we get to pick the fight and keep it consistently an "away game." As the Middle East "middle-ages" -- demographically speaking -- over the next quarter century, time is definitely on our side, since jihadism, like all revolutionary movements, is a young man's game.

Bad News: Al Qaeda's operational reach may now be effectively limited to the same territory (southwest Asia and extending to adjacent areas) as were the classic Middle Eastern terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, but that just means America's efforts to date have made us safer at the expense of allies in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In short, we've turned back the clock but made no strategic headway, plus we've created a dual cause célèbre in Iraq and Afghanistan that will stoke Al Qaeda's recruitment efforts for the long haul. Neither winning nor losing, the Bush administration has merely engineered a back-to-the-future operational stalemate at an unsustainably high cost in blood and treasure, effectively isolating America from the world in the process. Strategically speaking, we've reached a dead end.

Wild Card: Al Qaeda's pursuit of a weapon of mass destruction (think biological, not nuclear) is unrelenting, meaning eventually we will face this threat, and ultimately one side in this Long War will need to break out of the strategic stalemate. The key question, then, is, Which side is more energized and which is more exhausted? With the majority of Gulf oil now flowing to Asia and that trend only increasing with time, won't the American public eventually revolt at the notion that it's their oil and our blood? Osama sure hopes that one more strategic bitch-slap does the job.

Good News: The Kurdish areas are secure and thriving economically. Then again, they've been in the nation-building business ever since America started that no-fly zone in the early 1990s. The insurgency is still centered primarily in the Sunni Triangle, so many parts of the Shiite-controlled southeast are surviving okay, thanks in part to significant Iranian investment. Though the central government remains weak, it has forged some important compromises, like a deal to share oil revenue. Following our last best effort on the "surge," the inevitable U. S. drawdown -- and "drawback" from combat roles -- will look like Vietnam in reverse: We shift from direct action to advising locals. With any luck, Iraq's not much more of a fake state than Pakistan or Lebanon is, and America's military presence can retreat behind the wire of permanent bases in the Kurdish areas or Kuwait, where we currently keep about twenty-five thousand troops. By increasing our naval presence in the region, America can return somewhat to its historic role as offshore balancer in the region. And by participating in the regional peace conference on Iraq, it seems Bush may have finally discovered diplomacy in the Middle East. About time.

Bad News: Baghdad itself is an unmitigated disaster, and the Sunni Triangle has become a no-go zone for all but the most heavily armed outsiders. The horrific social toll of constant violence and massive unemployment is measured in dog years, meaning Bush's surge strategy is far too little and way too late. There is no "Iraq" any more than there was a "Yugoslavia," so America will have to accept this Humpty Dumpty outcome for what it is: a Balkans done backward. The Iraq Study Group rejected partitioning, saying it would be impossible to divide up major cities. Too bad the locals didn't get the word, because that low-grade "ethnic cleansing" proceeds rather vigorously -- neighborhood by neighborhood -- fueled by rising sectarian violence that outside interested parties (Iran, Saudi Arabia) clearly feed. America cannot stem this tide; only a combined effort by the neighbors can.

Wild Card: The right wrong move by embryonic Kurdistan could trigger a military intervention from anxious Turkey, especially after the highly contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk votes to join "free Kurdistan." Also looming is a Saudi-Iranian proxy war within Iraq itself, just as the persecution and targeting of restive Shiite minorities by entrenched Sunni regimes hits an inflection point regionwide -- nudge-nudge, wink-wink from the White House. For now, the Saudis seem content to 1) limit Iran's oil revenue by ramping up their production and 2) curb Iran's influence in Lebanon by funding Hezbollah's opponents. The regional peace conference on Iraq puts everyone at the same table, but if Sy Hersh is correct that Bush has already "redirected" on Iran, that parley might just be for show.

Good News: As we squeeze the Persian Gulf-centric radical Salafi jihadist movement, that balloon can expand in two directions over the near term: north into Central Asia or south into Africa. For now, Central Asia is relatively quiet, and local authoritarian regimes -- with the consent and support of all interested outside parties -- aim to keep it that way. Simply put, there are just too many untapped energy reserves in that region for neighboring great powers (e.g., Russia, Turkey, India, China, and even Shiite Iran) to let radical Sunni terror networks establish significant beachheads. Remember, China and Russia set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization way before 9/11, so calling our recent arrival (now down to just one military base in Kyrgyzstan) the resumption of the "great game" is a bit much. The Chinese and Russians are basically watching our backs on this one, and we should continue to let them do so because...

Bad News: ...This fight's headed south into sub-Saharan Africa over the long haul. The recent rise and fall of the Islamic courts in Somalia was but a preview of coming attractions. Don't believe? Then check out similar north-versus-south (i.e., Muslim versus Christian) fights simmering across a wide swath of middle Africa (basically where the desert meets the grasslands and forests), because it might not surprise you to find out that the cowboy and the farmer still can't be friends. Al Qaeda, according to our Defense Intelligence Agency, recently brokered an alliance with the Algerian Group for Salafist Preaching and Combat and has famously issued threats regarding any potential Western intervention in Sudan's Darfur region to stem the genocidal war being waged by the invasive Arab janjaweed against indigenous black Africans. Success in the Long War will not be marked by less violence or less resistance but by a shift in the geographic center of gravity out of the Gulf region and into Africa. Egypt, with its looming succession from Mubarak father to son (Hosni to Gamal), will continue to either fulfill or fail in its role as continental bulwark, much the way secular (and poorly appreciated) Turkey holds the line for Europe. But in the end, Africa simply offers too many attractive traction points for the Salafi jihadists not to engage as the Middle East middle-ages.

Wild Card: Bush has already announced and will sign into existence sometime between now and the end of his administration a new regional U. S. combatant command: AFRICOM, or African Command. The placeholder, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, now sits in a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti. It was originally set up as a picket line to trap Al Qaeda operatives as they exited the Gulf for the dark continent. These are the guys who recently helped engineer Ethiopia's intervention in Somalia, and their command represents a serious experiment in combining the "Three D's": diplomacy, development, and defense. AFRICOM will be the future of the fight and the fight of the future.

Good News: The Army and Marine Corps continue to calibrate their forces and doctrine to adapt to the long-term challenges of counterinsurgency and a return to the frontier-taming functions last witnessed when our Army of the West really was just our Army in our West. With General George Casey coming back from Iraq to become Army chief of staff and General David Petraeus, chief architect of the U. S. military's new counterinsurgency manual, slotting in behind him in Baghdad, that much needed trend can only accelerate. Two other solid moves by Bush: 1) selecting former CIA chief Robert Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense (at this point in the fight, it's better that insider agency types run the Pentagon than the outsider neocons) and 2) sliding Admiral "Fox" Fallon over from Pacific Command to Central Command, bringing along his substantial diplomatic experience and stubbornly strategic vision. (He led a PACOM effort to bolster military-to-military ties with China despite disapproval from Rumsfeld's Pentagon.) With AFRICOM standing up in 2008, we're seeing some serious lessons being learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Failure is a great teacher.

Bad News: The acquisition overhang from Rumsfeld's transformation initiative remains large, meaning we've still got way too many absurdly complex and expensive weapon systems and platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft) in the pipeline. As ongoing, largely ground operations increasingly exhaust the Army and Marine Corps (and their respective reserve components) both in personnel and equipment, many tough funding cuts loom on the horizon. Rumsfeld never confronted those hard choices, preferring in the end to send his generals to the Hill to beg for more money and let defense contractors stuff emergency supplemental bills with their pet programs. Hopefully, intel-savvy Gates will recognize that a substantial resource shift must ensue, in effect curtailing the Pentagon's obsession with smart weapons and boosting its ability to crank out smarter soldiers. But much depends on how Gates and the Bush administration continue to interpret China's rise in military terms. If you keep hearing the word hedge, then expect the Pentagon to keep overstuffing the war-fighting force while starving the nation-building one, and that nasty habit matters plenty if it's your loved ones over in southwest Asia today.

Wild Card: A winner would be Congress somehow stepping up and delivering "Goldwater-Nichols II," or an omnibus restructuring legislation that fixes the broken interagency process (the real cause of our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan) just as the original fixed the dysfunctional interservice rivalries that plagued our military in the post-Vietnam era. Of course, the really bold step would be to create some Cabinet-level department that focuses on transition or failed states. We basically know how to deal with countries in war (Defense) and peace (State). What we lack, though, is a bureaucratic center of gravity that specializes in getting weak states from war to peace. Presidential candidates and a blue-ribbon commission or two are already raising this proposal, so it's out there, waiting for our next massive fuckup to bring it into being.

Good News: The International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 2002 as a permanent version of the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. As an international court of last resort, it's designed to put war criminals on trial for crimes against humanity. With 104 signatory states, the ICC possesses a well-credentialed system for adjudicating and imprisoning such bad actors. What it's missing is a mechanism for bringing them to justice. Oddly enough, the United States possesses a military force with global reach that routinely snatches these guys, only to hide them in secret prisons and put them on secret trial with secret evidence. The U. S. has kept the court at arm's length, fearing its power enough to negotiate bilateral immunity treaties with roughly a hundred states around the world where we anticipate the possibility of future military interventions (since we fear our soldiers and officials will be subject to war-crime accusations). These arrangements will retard the development of global case law. Eventually, Washington will come to its senses.

Bad News: The Bush administration's continuing Dirty Harry take on the Geneva Conventions destroys America's international reputation for the rule of law, providing us with a host of highly questionable practices in the name of "global war," such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the holding of ghost detainees who disappear into the paperwork, the ordering of "extraordinary renditions," by which suspects are deposited with allies who have long histories of torture, and the extraction of confessions by methods right out of the Salem witch trials. If our own Supreme Court can't stomach much of this, how can we expect to win any hearts and minds abroad by mimicking the human-rights abuses of the very same authoritarian regimes (e.g., Saudi Arabia, Egypt) targeted by our lawless enemies, the Salafi jihadists?

Wild Card: Abu Ghraib didn't do it. Gitmo hasn't done it. Short of killing fields being dug up, it's hard to imagine what would dramatically alter the playing field as seen by the Bush-Cheney team. Bush the Decider, after all, basically blew off both the November election and the Iraq Study Group, so it would seem he's not one to be swayed by much when his famous gut tells him otherwise. Our best hope would seem to be for our Supreme Court to step up more aggressively over time -- maybe even before Oslo starts handing out Nobel prizes to the whistle-blowers.

Good News: The Karzai regime muddles along, keeping the bulk of Afghanistan reasonably stable while enabling legitimate economic growth in those pockets not controlled by the druggies. The Musharraf regime does one better in Pakistan, which is growing at a solid clip and finally starting to attract foreign direct investment that underscores its strategic location as connector between the energy-rich southwest-central Asia and the energy-hungry south and east Asia. When you're talking about the parts of both countries that are effectively governed by the center, either situation is arguably described as a slowly modernizing "success story" in the Long War. Hey, when Iraq defines the floor, these two mark -- by comparison -- the ceiling.

Bad News: The problem is, of course, that neither capital effectively controls the hinterlands, which overlap precipitously along their shared, mountainous border. There the poppy trade booms, prestate tribalism rules, and the Taliban are back in the business of state-sponsored terror, thanks in no small part to a de facto peace treaty with Musharraf's regime. The Pashtun tribes of northwest Pakistan have been ungovernable for as long as history records. While outsiders can effectively ally with them against perceived common enemies, as America did against the Soviets in Afghanistan, none have effectively conquered them. And yet the Taliban are carving out a ministate within these lands, employing their usual brutal techniques. The result is, once again, a secure sanctuary for Al Qaeda's global leadership (to include Osama bin Laden) and a training ground for motivated jihadists.

Wild Card: The next 9/11-like attack on American soil -- especially if WMD are involved -- could well trigger the gravest consequences for the Taliban's state-within-a-state. Americans might just countenance a limited nuclear strike in an eye-for-an-eye moment of unleashed fury and frustration. Unthinkable? We did it to Japan under far cooler circumstances but for similar reasons -- namely, a full-scale invasion seemed prohibitively costly in human life. Is nuking Afghanistan advisable? No, nuking is always a bad idea. But rubble, as they say, makes no trouble, and bombing them back to the Stone Age would be a very short trip.

Good News: China's torrid growth continues, despite all predictions that it must soon end lest it tear the country apart through some combination of the horrific environmental disasters just unfolding, a financial panic caused by a still-rickety banking system, or -- Mao forbid! -- political unrest among the masses of rural peasants left behind in abject poverty. So long as the foreign direct investment flows (China's the number-one target in the world outside the West) and export volume rises, the Chinese Communist Party, which has staked its regime legitimacy almost entirely on raising income levels, continues to pull off the seemingly impossible: creating a world-class domestic market while whittling down the world's largest state sector. How hard is that? Bill Clinton created more than twenty million new jobs in America across his eight years as president. China's leaders need to generate almost the same number of new jobs every year to keep this juggernaut moving forward.

Bad News: China's military buildup is real, although America's slated to outspend it by roughly $10 trillion over the next two decades, so our lead seems pretty safe. What's so scary right now about China's strategic relationship with the United States, or lack thereof, is that our economic interdependence is very real and rapidly expanding while our security ties remain embryonic at best and highly suspicious at worst. Even if we get past North Korea, the Taiwan situation still divides us strategically, and as China increasingly penetrates the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America with its rather unprincipled investment strategies, opportunities for conflict with U. S. security interests will abound. Given the right breakdown of cooperation over Iran (or failure to get any in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela -- you name it), wecould be looking at a resumption of cold-war binary thinking by which Washington hawks calculate every international loss (or even slight) as China's zero-sum gain. Factor in a Democratic-led Congress eager to take on the threat of "cheap Chinese labor" and their underappreciated currency, and what should be globalization's strongest bilateral relationship could easily turn into its worst -- even the cause for its demise.

Wild Card: You'll get the same answer from Wall Street CEOs and White House staffers: Nobody wants to see a financial meltdown triggered inside China, because nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has any idea how bad that could get for the global economy as a whole. Eventually, something has to give in China's still-white-hot economy, so the question really isn't Can a financial panic happen in China? but rather How will America handle it when it does?

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in maintaining a fairly coherent unity of effort with Russia, Japan, China, and South Korea, in that we're all still talking and cooperating and worrying about the same things. Admittedly, we've not accomplished much vis-a-vis Kim Jong Il's regime (the recent deal smells of a Clinton-like "freeze," with the truly hard details -- like the actual bombs -- left to the future), but the dialogue itself is laying the groundwork for a post-Kim effort to construct an East Asia NATO-like security architecture that cements China's role as the Germany of Asia and ends fears of emerging security rivalries with offshore Japan. (Asia's never enjoyed a stable peace when both China and Japan were powerful.) While Kim's successfully blackmailed us in the past on nukes, his kleptocratic regime's reliance on self-financing through criminal activities does leave it vulnerable to the sort of stringent financial sanctions recently imposed by the U. S. That tactic begins to work when Chinese banks, more interested in maintaining their international credit ratings, start choosing transparency over illicit dealings with Pyongyang. Talk Tokyo and Beijing into a naval blockade and we may set an endgame in motion.

Bad News: The recent Bush deal is a bad deal that should give no one comfort, as it is unlikely to force Kim into giving up his nukes (not when the blackmailing still works for aid), and then there's the unacknowledged second nuclear program that Pyongyang bought from Pakistan years back. We haven't even begun the negotiations on that one yet. Unlike the years-in-the-making danger of a nuclear Iran, Kim's got the necessary missile technology in hand, and he tested his first crude nuke last October. Remembering East Germany's fate, Kim confronts the high likelihood of not just near-term attempts at regime change but the inevitable liquidation of his entire nation as the wrong half of the last divided-state situation to linger beyond the cold war. Despite Ahmadinejad's fiery threats, Iran's mullahs have plenty to live for, while Kim's got everything to lose, making his long-demonstrated siege mentality and willingness to sacrifice millions of his own people to preserve his rule two crucial indicators of his undeterrability. The problem with the slow squeeze we're pursuing is that eventually it'll trigger some reckless act from Kim, which in turn sets in motion the following scary scenario: South Korean and U. S. forces pouring in from the south and sea, Chinese forces entering from the north to prevent refugee flows, and somewhere in that small chaotic space, the world's fourth-largest military armed with some unknown number of nuclear devices and a Gotterdämmerung-inducing ideology of racial superiority. No wonder Beijing's not so psyched to get it on.

Wild Card: Beijing's clearly in the driver's seat on this one, which makes the government's not-so-quiet examination of Ceausescu's rapid fall in Romania in late 1989 (hint: Moscow's KGB gave him a push) all the more telling. China's leaders are definitely exploring an exit strategy on this one, the timing of which couldn't be more crucial for the future of Sino-American relations.

Good News: There's about twenty months left in W.'s presidency and his heart's one helluva lot stronger than Cheney's. The Iraq tie-down pretty much means Bush can't start any more wars anywhere else, despite all the tough talk. Much like Jimmy Carter near the end, Bush seems wholly engulfed by the Gulf, but since nobody other than that pesky Hugo Chávez seems intent on pressing our disadvantage, that's probably a good thing. Although this administration has been willfully oblivious to its gargantuan federal deficits up to now (what is it about Republican administrations?), Bush has somewhat cynically found religion on the subject recently, declaring his new goal of eliminating those deficits somewhere around the end of his successor's first term. Talk about passing the buck! Then again, if Bush's surge strategy in Iraq creates even the slightest semblance of job-not-too-horrendously-done and allows for our troops' effective withdrawal from combat duty there by January 2009, I doubt we'd hear any complaints from the new resident at 1600.

Bad News: Condoleezza Rice is proving to be an even weaker secretary of state than Colin Powell, although at least she talks out of only one side of her mouth. Then again, since Rice's diplomacy consists solely of delivering White House talking points the world over, that is a mean trick. All dissing aside, the real problem with American diplomacy under Bush (if you can call it diplomacy) is that Dick Cheney has been in charge of it all along, and now that ¸ber-ally Don Rumsfeld is gone at Defense, we won't even see its muscular version (the Bush Doctrine) employed anymore, leaving us with basically no foreign policy whatsoever. The big problem with this state of affairs is that Bush's postpresidency has started earlier in his second term than any leader since Richard Nixon, leaving America's global leadership adrift at a rather fluid moment in history. I'm not just talking the Long War but the other 95 percent of reality that actually makes the world go round. With Tony Blair leaving office in the UK, there's virtually no adult supervision left anywhere, which is sad because, with a global economy humming as nice as this one is, the world could really take advantage of some visionary leadership right now to tackle a host of compelling global challenges like AIDS, global warming, childhood diseases -- you know, the whole Two Bills/Bono agenda!

Wild Card: Bush has said repeatedly that he's on a personal mission to deny Iran nuclear weapons, and Cheney wants nothing more than to go down in history as the man who restored power to the American presidency. Put those two scary dynamics together and you've got the mother of all October surprises come 2008. Washington is naturally all abuzz with this prospect, causing Bush to deny publicly any plans for war. But as we've learned with this administration, it's Deny, deny, deny, and then strike! If and when Bush pulls that trigger, watch the Democratic Congress start impeachment proceedings. That'll make it two-for-two with Boomer presidents, but that only makes sense for a generation who came of age with Watergate.

Good News: The Bush administration has been successful in drawing both Russia and China into multilateral security discussions on Iran and North Korea, and even when both nations routinely water down our proposed responses, they're staying in the conversation, offering their own helpful ideas (like Moscow's proposal to outsource Iran's uranium enrichment) and generally becoming more comfortable coordinating security policies with the West's great powers on issues of shared concern. It may not sound like much, but such routine is what builds up relationships over the long haul. As Washington's relatively successful courtship of rising India has shown, it's the small gestures that matter most, like the United States finally acknowledging New Delhi's standing as a nuclear power. With India and China, we're looking at two big body shops -- as in, million-man-plus armies -- that logically should someday soon be enlisted for long-term cooperative peacekeeping and nation-building efforts in Africa, where both nations currently deploy tens of thousands of nationals in market-making commercial and developmental activities. You want to do stuff on the cheap? Well, you better find cheap labor.

Bad News: Each of the big players suffers from strategic myopia, meaning none are currently capable of punching their weight internationally at America's side. With Russia, it's their obsession with their so-called near abroad (the Caucasus and Central Asia) and Putin's aggressive push to renationalize the commanding heights of Russia's new economy -- namely, the energy sector. The Chinese, despite their ballooning reliance on distant foreign energy sources, still act as though their entire strategic environment boils down to the Taiwan Strait. Ditto for India and Kashmir. South Korea's ready to climb on Oprah's couch over its queer embrace of its long-lost sibling to the north, but don't expect it to climb out of any foxholes anytime soon on our behalf. Toss in glass-jaw Japan and there's not really anybody in the East we can count on in a tight spot.

Wild Card: The truly intriguing wild cards are local disasters that provide the U. S. military the pretext for drawing out these rising states' militaries in cooperative humanitarian responses, the way the 2004 Christmas tsunamis helped the Pentagon reestablish military-to-military ties with Indonesia (as well as triggering the internal solution of Indonesia's Aceh secessionist movement). If there's going to be a global-warming tipping-point disaster, it'll probably unfold in the East Asian littoral.

Good News: Recent elections and those looming on the horizon are not producing a crop of anti-American leaders among our traditional allies, which is extraordinarily generous on their part given the unprecedented anti-Americanism that's pervaded the vast majority of the world across the Bush administration. With France and the UK in transition, Germany's Angela Merkel has emerged as Europe's most powerful female leader since Margaret Thatcher, to whom the "iron Frau" is most commonly compared. Most important for America, Merkel is intent on keeping the transatlantic relationship strong and bolstering the role of NATO as its preeminent security structure. With Shinzo Abe taking the reins in economically resurgent Japan and pushing for expanded ties with NATO, we're seeing the old West as a whole assume a more forward-leaning security posture. Given the UN's enduring weakness, NATO's imprimatur is as close as America can get to approval by the international community for most overseas military interventions, with our Balkan missions serving as the best model to date.

Bad News: Though NATO is in Afghanistan, the many operational limitations imposed by individual members make its employment consistently suboptimal, and it has done little to bolster U. S. troop efforts to tame the Taliban's growing influence in the south. As for Iraq, the Middle East, much like all of Africa, simply remains a bridge too far for this collection of former colonial powers who aren't much interested in any lengthy return engagements (although the French occasionally pop up in Africa now and then). Other than the Brits (who've already opted out of Bush's surge strategy in Iraq), it is hard to imagine NATO countries taking serious numbers of casualties anywhere outside of Europe (okay, the French and Italian effort in south Lebanon has some merit), not with the EU's growing unease over its "absorption capacity" of new eastern members and popular fears of the invasive species known as Homo Islamicus. In a Long War with a high body requirement, it's unrealistic for America to assume that its traditional military allies, all of whom are demographically moribund, will suffice for the quagmire-like interventions that lie ahead.

Wild Card: The globalization wormhole that connects the United Kingdom to Pakistan features substantial two-way traffic whose upshot is a steady stream of radicalized expats landing in British working-class neighborhoods on a daily basis. The West's "stargate" on this, Britain's world-class internal security service, MI5, cannot possibly uncover every plot, so if that lucky strike hits the right target at the right time, our European friends could suddenly veer into a Children of Men-like extreme-lockdown scenario.

Good News: Despite all the ominous news, the developing world is not awash in civil strife. Africa, for example, was suffering from sixteen major civil or cross-border conflicts half a decade ago but endures only a half dozen today. Thanks to the commodities boom, infrastructure development there has shifted from being a supply-push aid effort led by the West to a demand-pull construction effort led by the East. In Latin America, the only serious insurgency still operating is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the dozen recent elections there produced far more market-friendly leaders than Chávez-like populists. East Asia's relatively quiet, with nasty flare-ups in Sri Lanka and East Timor, and the dominant economic trends there continue to be rapid marketization and long-term integration with China, globalization's premier final assembler of manufactured goods. Best of all, the current oil boom has triggered voluminous "east-east" capital flows, whereby Arab energy producers direct their surplus capital to Asia's infrastructure build-out while Asia's high savings rates are beginning to flow into the Gulf's emerging financial hubs, in addition to its energy sector.

Bad News: The West's stubborn holdout on its agricultural subsidies keeps the WTO's Doha Round from doing what it should to jump-start agricultural markets in developing economies. While China's doing plenty to create infrastructure in many resource-rich states, it's also replicating the profile that European colonial powers once employed: trading low-cost manufactures for even lower-end commodities. Net result? Local producers and small manufacturers tend to be crowded out by China's Wal-Mart-like impact. No wonder rising economic nationalism in Latin America, for example, is increasingly directed at China instead of just the usual culprits in the West.

Wild Card: Anything that torpedoes China's economic juggernaut would have a huge impact throughout the developing world, so probably the nastiest wild card to cue up would be the SARS/avian-flu-after-next that both derails Asian economies while overwhelming the meager public-health capacities of developing economies.

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Let me submit that we're living through the final months of the hedgehog presidency of one George W. Bush, whose greatest failure has been his lack of strategic imagination.

Now, as the 2008 presidential campaign gears up, let me presume to offer this: avoid hedgehogs. Don't listen to candidates who tell you this whole election boils down to one thing and one thing alone. We need a president with more than one answer to every question, one whose tool kit is as diverse as his -- or her -- ideology is flexible. We need a deal maker, a compromiser, a closer. We need someone able to finish what others cannot and start that which others dare not.

We need a leader who knows many things, because we've had quite enough of those who know only one big thing.

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